Kuhnian Pragmatism: Mapping the Subjective

“God is dead, Marxism is undergoing a crisis, and I don’t feel too hot myself.” So goes a quip which communicates some of the difficulties of life in the Western world during the 20th century. The church was no longer a source of universal authority, many of Europe’s nation-states had turned against each other on both nationalistic and ideological grounds, and the epistemic basis for Enlightenment scientific philosophy had been thoroughly compromised. The limits of human understanding had been fixed by Kant who had eliminated the representational model of philosophy and replaced it with a mathematical and subjective positivism.

The challenges presented by this new awareness of human subjectivity elicited a wide spectrum of responses, from the nihilistic café-mobbers to the ordinary-language philosophers and the pragmatic yet-transcendental phenomenology of Husserls’ progeny.

Although it is easy for a Christian to dismiss these philosophies as largely, if not wholly, relativistic and atheistic, these philosophies were responses to a real crisis of reason which was threatening to defeat the basis for philosophical and scientific inquiry in the western world.

With this understanding of the particular problems of the modern and postmodern philosophical projects I will examine the failure of the Logical Positivists’ verification principle, the source of the Existentialists ennui, and the benefits of Thomas Kuhn’s paradigmatic model of science and epistemology. In particular, I am adopting the perspective that Kuhn’s embrace of subjectivity creates a more coherent and useful response than both the Logical Positivists and Existentialists because he rejected the need for objective certainty.

LOGICAL POSITIVISM AND THE VIENNA CIRCLE
Logical Positivism was developed in the early 20th century by a group of scientifically-trained philosophers called the Vienna Circle. The Vienna Circle was led by Moritz Schlick and included the philosophers A.J. Ayer and Rudolf Carnap among its members. The Logical Positivists were inspired by the work of Empiricists such as David Hume and Bertrand Russell and sought to eliminate all transcendental metaphysics in favor of an empirically verifiable scientific philosophy. The Vienna Circle rejected not only metaphysics, but also Kant’s category of synthetic a priori propositions. They rejected this Kantian category after the theory of relativity had disproved the universal application of Euclidean geometry — a prime example of the synthetic a priori.

Two members of the Vienna Circle, Ayer and Carnap, popularized aspects of its philosophical tenets including the verification principle, which was an expression of their strictly empirical standard for propositional content. This Empirical stance followed Hume’s negative attitude towards ethical, theological, and metaphysical speculations. Hume rejected these claims as merely emotional or attitudinal postures, rather than statements which have actual content and are meaningful to the mind. One of Ayer and Carnap’s projects was to create a logical mode of language in which only meaningful statements could be employed. They attempted to clarify language, especially philosophical language, by eliminating ambiguous terminologies which carried no empirical sense, and thus, no cognitive meaning.

The motivation for this language-winnowing activity was a belief that precise terms yielded by their standard of absolute verification would carry content specific enough to be used in logical and mathematical calculations. This logical language could then yield absolute knowledge of necessary truths and relations of ideas. The appeal of this method was that it seemed to require no metaphysical or emotional claims — thereby fulfilling Hume’s criteria for solely empirical rational argumentation — while providing a method for acquiring knowledge of universal principles of cognitive activity.

Logical Positivism as a philosophical system was partially abandoned in its own day due to the irresolvable difficulties of the verification principle. Despite Carnap and Ayers confidence in the methods of science and mathematics as means to universally applicable truths, they still maintained that the manifold of our experience consists only of subjective observation and the structure of the mind. The flaw in the argument comes then not from their analytical methods, but in the underlying assumption that the verification principle can itself be verified according to its own standards.

The verification principle is self-refuting because asserts a universal claim from particular data and does not allow generalizations or other non-sense claims. Given the high standard for what terms are to be allowed, any universal claims — including the universal claim that the verification principle is correct — would require an exhaustive amount of empirical evidence. In order to be viable, the logical positivist verification principle would require something akin to an epiphany to establish even the essential means to justify itself — and epiphanies are not allowed.

Because the foundational premises of the Logical Positivists required a type of knowledge that was unacceptable according to its own standards, they failed to provide a sufficient basis for productive scientific or philosophical pursuits. While they may have had other, more useful projects, the Vienna Circle’s verification principle required the sort of universal objectivity which its positivism sought to avoid.

SARTRE’S ATHEISTIC EXISTENTIALISM
The atheistic existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre was based, at least in part, on his interpretation of Heidegger’s doctrine that existence precedes essence and that there is a resulting anxiety and tension involved in being human. Sartre took this idea and divorced it from Heidegger’s original intention: focusing on Existential Anxiety whereas Heidegger was more concerned with the issue of ontology. Early in his career as a popular philosopher, Sartre rejected the idea of a creator-God completely, maintaining that there can be no such thing as a human essence if there is no artisan creating that essence. The bare fact that we are thus precedes any fixed concept of what we are. For Sartre, the concepts of humanity, moral values, linguistic representation, and all other aspects of our conscious social existence are self-determined. Sartre believed that the death of God which Nietzsche had announced had created an ethical ground-zero of which philosophers and scientists should become acutely aware. The responsibility and weight of this subjectivism was felt heavily, and Sartre pushed the need for honest and instinctive self-realization.

In Sartre’s early philosophy, his doctrine of subjectivist self-determination was paired with the sharp realization that a self-determined existence is fundamentally absurd. These beliefs of Sartre’s were shared with others in Existentialist movements. With a sentimental emphasis akin to the Romantic movements of the Enlightenment, the Existentialists viewed the developments of science, religion, philosophy and language as absurd games that had been created by men, for men, but contained no real meaning which could function as a grounding principle.

Sartre, however, did not show his full hand. For a true Nihilist the absurdity of the subjective should create neither despair, nor anxiety. If we have no essence, and the meaning of our existence is null, then despair is groundless. What creates this anxiety is not merely a belief that our experience is subjective and self-determined, but also the implicit belief that there may be objectively-determined essence which precedes existence.

Thus, the failure of Existentialism is analogous to the failure of Logical Positivism: the desire for the objective paired with the realization of the subjective. If the natural world yields no accessible reference to an essence prior to existence, all which is left is pure meaningless contingency — this is only a problem if there is some claim to a need for prior essence.

Existentialist ennui is therefore not simply recognition of subjectivity, but is the result of that recognition paired with the desire for objectivity.

Both the Existentialist and Logical Positivists suffered from fundamental inconsistency in response to the problem of uncertainty. Both groups affirmed the subjectivity of human experience and denied the possibility of a verifiable and accessible objective reference point, but both required knowledge of a universal prior reality to resolve the tensions within their worldviews.

THOMAS KUHN
Thomas Kuhn’s philosophical project was fundamentally different from both the Existentialist and Logical Positivists’. Kuhn, a physicist who became a historian of science and philosophy, adopted an idealist historiographical philosophy which rejected the notion that science progresses by continual, graduated steps to become an accurate model of the world.

According to Kuhn, the ordinary practice of science takes place within a paradigm that has been established and ratified by the group of professionals who have been initiated into the gestalt-forming principles of that paradigm. Under this model, scientific progress is achieved when the tacit knowledge received in studying or solving a number of exemplary problems can be applied in a consistent and useful way to a previously unsolvable problem. Thus, for Kuhn, progress is not an ontological trajectory in which our theoretical systems more and more accord with the truth.

Rather than establish a means to transcend the subjective, Kuhn demonstrates how scientific theories emerge from paradigms in response to specific problems and are maintained until they are no longer able to solve those problems and can be successfully abandoned in favor of a new paradigm. Kuhn’s project makes no pretense to positive metaphysical claims, but focuses on solving problems progressively within a subjective system. The paradigm which underlies that system will only be maintained until that system is no longer appealing and must be discarded in favor of another.

Among the defining features of this Kuhnian Pragmatism is the theory of Incommensurability. Kuhn stated that the fact that multiple theoretical constructions can always be used to deal with a given set of data illustrates that the paradigmatic gestalt employed is not entirely dictated by the problems it faces. Rather, Kuhn saw the bases of paradigms as being outside the practice of ordinary science and necessarily differentiated if a gestalt-switch can be said to occur. The most standard feature of Incommensurability is that there will be features of a discarded paradigm which will have no continuity in the succeeding one. This fundamental discontinuity necessitates, at some level, a complete break with prior scientific terminology and methodology.

Because Kuhn denied that scientific progress exists independently of the pragmatic paradigm choices of particular communities, he was able to give a pragmatic purpose and operating principle for scientific philosophers in the 20th century, while not over-extending the reach of his claims by claiming an objective reference point. This acknowledgement of reality, subjectively experienced, combined with his pragmatic understanding of theory and paradigm construction is what has made Kuhn the most-cited man in a 20th and 21st century filled with uncertainty.